The Crossnore Weaving Room
Where every thread is touched by human hands
Physicians Eustace and Mary Martin Sloop road horseback into the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1909, spending their honeymoon as they would spend the lives, ministering to the sick and needy of the hills. During their remarkable years, they built a hospital, a church, and Mrs. Sloop's beloved Crossnore School, where she dedicated her life to educating the mountain children.
Today the mission of Crossnore School is to offer a stable, healing environment in a home-like setting for children from families in crisis. Most students are from surrounding counties, placed by legal custodians because circumstances prevent their living at home. The school provides for the children's educational, emotional, physical, and religious development while the counseling staff works with the families.
A way for mountain families to make some cash
The Weaving Room opened in 1923 to provide mountain women with a product that could generate cash for their impoverished families. Zada Benfield, one of Crossnore School's first graduates, helped start the weaving program after studying at Berea College (Kentucky) where the Southern handicrafting revival originated. Clara Lowrance took over as director in 1924 and was succeeded by her star pupil, Mrs. Newbern Johnson in 1926. Aunt Newbie managed the Weaving Room for the next three decades.
The current Weaving Room building was constructed of rock that was collected from the river by a brigade of children in 1936 after a fire destroyed an earlier log building. The building that houses the Crossnore Weavers was placed on the National Registry of Historic Places in 2001.
Old and young alike learned to weave from Aunt Newbie. Nettie Jane Clark had two children working in the weaving room after school hours when she decided she wanted to learn to weave, too. She asked if they would bring the loom to her home, because she could not leave her small children, so her daughters carried up the peices and Aunt Newbie put the loom together. Every now and then the girls would come down the mountain with an arm load of "Lee's Surrender" rugs and return home with a check.
One day one of Nettie Jane's smallest girls asked Aunt Newbie which of the lot she thought was made the best. After selecting one the little girl had made herself Aunt Newbie offered to make out a separate check, but the child declined, saying, "Put them all together. The last check finished paying for the flooring on our new house. This check' agoin' to start the windows."
Reviving traditional patterns
"When Mrs. Sloop and Mrs. Benfield began efforts to revive weaving, families still had pieces of their grandmother's work for reference. Old patterns were documented and many were found preserved on strips of paper, carefully folded and pressed between the pages of old family Bibles. The drafts were the recipes which outlined sequences in the patterns, each with a name to stir the patriotic breast: "Martha Washington," "Lee's Surrender," "Wheat Row," and "Double Diamond."
As many as 1,800 different threads are wound around the warp and loaded onto the four-harness Hammett looms. To avoid losing a pattern or making a mistake, the women keep the looms threaded and tie new lengths of thread to the end when loading a new warp. This saves them at least three days work in rethreading, and untold frustration from undoing mistakes. It will take two women an eight-hour day, 16 wage hours, just to tie a new warp to the bedspread loom.
"The Weaving Room is different because you don't have centers that are doing production anymore," said Ellie Hjemmet, former Weaving Room manager and founder of the Blue Ridge Fiber Guild. "There are individual weavers who are perpetuating the traditional methods and see the craft from the perspective of their own personal focus, but the Weaving Room represents the heritage in a more direct lineage. The people who are employed here are the families that the business was started for.
"It is that connection, that very close connection with the crafts revival in the 1920s, that is unique. They still do things that they were doing in the nineteen and teens. The same looms, the same weavers. Where can you find that?"
A different kind of factory worker
Resistance to change is a mountain trait, but one change that has evolved in the past two decades is the perception that the weavers have of themselves and the value of what they do.
Using a scholarship supported by the Avery Arts Council, the weavers have been able to attend classes at nearby Penland School. At Penland, the weavers got to see themselves in a very different light.
"Instead of considering that they are a rather different kind of factory worker," said Hjemmet, they have seen themselves as artists and craftsmen. Their weaving skills, because they weave eight hours a day, five days a week, are really quite superior, and they get a lot of strokes for how wonderful they are."
Profits from the Weaving Room sales do not provide enough cash to keep Crossnore School open, but the School's directors know that the Weaving Room's value is not in the receipts it generates, but rather in the friendships it makes.
"The Weaving Room is like a front door for the school," said Hjemmet. "People remember the school through the products they take home. They choose to come visit the school because they heard about the Weaving Room and they get interested in the children. It offers a way to intersect with caring people."
A National historic site
The Weaving Room is on the National Register of Historic Places and is being developed as a museum. Visitors can see samples of the Weaving Room's early textiles collected from across the county and back down the years. Housed in the river-rock building at 100 DAR Drive, the museum is open from 8:30 to 5:00 daily except Wednesday and Sunday.
The Weaving Room maintains a staff of about five weavers, recruited through local want ads and trained by Crossnore weavers. The generation that learned the craft from Aunt Newbie has passed, but they left a warm legacy of a thousand beautiful weavings.
"There is something spiritual about hand-made goods," said Ellie Hjemmet. "Knowing that each thread was touched many times by human hands gives it a life of its own."
